Comments

2
"Still, it's hard to doubt the sincerity of Clinton's interest and sympathy for the suffering endured by the mothers of kids who've been gunned down when you're being paid to write pro-Clinton articles."
3
Matt,
Bad idea for her to be standing next to Al Sharpton. Yes, I know he's a friend of the Pres. But, he's poison. No sir, I don't like him at all.
4
It'd be kinda nice if they included a few Honduran mothers to round things out a bit.
5
Good for Hillary. Obama got vilified when he tried to talk about the issue. And it's another reason I'm thrilled that our next president is going to be a tough, savvy, brilliant, almost overqualified, life-long fighter for the underdog, results focused, progressive woman.

She also knows how to keep her friends close, but keep her enemies closer (the financial machine), picking their pockets along the way and using the money to get into a position where she can not only jerk their chains as needed, but bring about much of the other real change that her, stunningly unprepared to be president, opponent only talks about in recyled Trotsky/Wobbly platitudes. Hell, I even like her personality and appearance.

It truly dumbfounds me that seemingly intelligent people, actual real friends of mine, not only believed that Bernie would be the nominee and win the presidency, but their cultish and willfully ignorant belief in this guy, without even really knowing much about him, is something I'll never understand. The African America community knows what I'm talking about, thank god.
6
Kids gunned down by superpredators, no doubt.
7
@ 5, Really? I find it incredible that so many Clinton supporters refuse to care that many people are in these desperate situations due to the actions of the Clintons (1994 crime bill, welfare reform, financial ties to the private, for-profit prison industry, and on and on and on). It would take an hour to list it all.
8
@ 5 (mfg5000):

She also knows how to keep her friends close, but keep her enemies closer (the financial machine), picking their pockets along the way and using the money to get into a position where she can not only jerk their chains as needed, but bring about much of the other real change that her, stunningly unprepared to be president, opponent only talks about in recyled Trotsky/Wobbly platitudes. Hell, I even like her personality and appearance.
Wow! And they say Bernie supporters are deluded! When, pray tell, have the Clintons ever fucked over a big contributor to help the little people? And the Trotsky/Wobbly smear? I'm seeing nothing but proven social-democratic planks in Bernie's platform, stuff from the New Deal, the Great Society, and northern Europe. We know from our own past and from foreign experience that single-payer healthcare, stock-market transaction taxes, significantly more progressive overall taxation, and essentially free higher education work, and work better than what we're doing now. But thank you for a truly hilarious contribution.
9
#7, It's not that we refuse to care (not that at all), it's that we tend to be more accepting of the historical context in which both were written, and we (I, at least) tend to believe Hillary when she states that she was not a fan of the welfare reform bill at the time, but that welfare reform was a given, so it was better to have passed the Clinton bill than to leave it in the hands of the republicans, where it would have been so much worse. While I have read a lot of criticism by black authors about these bills, there has also been a lot written in their defense.

She has since denounced both bills, and I trust that, given her history of working with various groups within the African American community in NYC on this level, she is being sincere. This story is just one of many examples of that outreach, and if you listened to WNYC, you'd hear a lot of these same stories from African Americans who have worked closely with her and adore her dating from way back before the presidential campaign. It's really not hard to find information about why she has the black vote, and I don't know why stories like this are surprising to anyone who has done any research on her.
10
"Still, it's hard to doubt the sincerity of Clinton's interest and sympathy for the suffering endured by the mothers of kids who've been gunned down."

She's insincere about everything else (except making money for Clinton Inc.), so why not this? In fact, I'm quite certain it's a pure ploy. Probably a good one, and hopefully for her sake better executed than the debacle at the Nancy Reagan funeral.
11
PCM. It's my pleasure to amuse you. But you forget to mention that Bernie's "proven social-democratic planks" also include his visiting, and gushing like a teenager, over the Nicaraguan and Cuban governments while he was a small town mayor in Vermont, at a time when the Sandinistas were slaughtering indigenous people and tribes by the thousands, and the Castros were imprisoning any and everyone who said or did anything they didn't like, and still are. And no, Bernie is no FDR or LBJ, and it's kinda fun watching that reality finally dawn on you guys. It's a cruel and guilty pleasure but hey, everyone gets to feel smug once in a while. Even the adults in the room.
12
@11 (mfg5000):

When Bernie was "gushing" over Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro, would that be around the time Hillary was on Walmart's board of directors? And these "indigenous people and tribes" being "slaughtered" "by the thousands" by the Sandinistas, would they happen to have been Contras recruited and funded by Reagan's CIA with the proceeds of illegal arms sales to Iran and smuggled coke in the US? During their short tenure, the Sandinistas raised Spanish literacy in Nicaragua from around 50% to around 88%. (They also had a literacy program for native languages, but, obviously, just for the indigenous peoples they hadn't slaughtered.) They stepped aside peacefully when they were voted out in subsequent elections. (Ortega was subsequently voted back in and continued his literacy work.) Fidel and Che built a universal healthcare system that gets outcomes comparable to ours, despite Cuba's being a dramatically poorer country. Cubans live almost as long as Americans, and their infant, child, and maternal mortality rates are better than ours. [Please, go ahead and trot out the old canard about how the Cubans rig their infant mortality stats. I traced it back to a single Cuban dissident used as an anonymous source by halfwit libertarian screedmeister John Stossel.] Those accomplishments, at least, are worth gushing over. Who would you prefer him to have gushed over? Videla? Pinochet? Figueiredo? Suharto? Hillary's mentor in international affairs, Henry Kissinger, certainly did.

As for Bernie not being an FDR or LBJ, well, the jury is still out. He doesn't yet have the bully pulpit, like FDR did. He's not yet in a position to grasp recalcitrant congresscritters' balls and squeeze, like LBJ did. He's been forced into compromises that many social-democrats and leftists find hard to stomach. If Bernie hadn't run as a Democrat, the six media conglomerates that control over 90% of American media would have blackballed him as thoroughly and successfully as they have Jill Stein of the Green Party. (She placed fourth in the 2012 popular vote, behind Libertarian Gary Johnson. Most American voters wouldn't so much as recognize their names, let alone their platforms.) If Bernie hadn't promised to support Hillary if she won the nomination, the Democrats would not have let him run as a Democrat. If Bernie hadn't ended up voting for the Affordable Care Act -- which is not a step toward cost-effective universal healthcare but rather the institutionalization of the for-profit health sector's trillion-dollar-a-year profiteering and administrative-featherbedding racket -- Senate Democrats would have stripped him of his chairmanship on the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs and blackballed him from then on out, putting an end to his long run of successful progressive amendments.

So, no, Bernie is not the Messiah, but to us adults in the room, he's the only viable candidate in this race who credibly represents the interests of the working and middle classes. Hillary's (and Bill's) entire history is one of service to the super-rich with cosmetic window dressing and crumbs to placate the hoi polloi. The whole point of the Democratic Leadership Council (which Hillary was active in and which Bill chaired) was to compete with Republicans for big corporate money. Bill, Barack, Hillary, and the New Democrats are the culmination of that pursuit. The Democratic Party is now the New Republican Lite party, far to the right of Eisenhower and even Nixon. Setting aside Trump's Tourette-like panders to racists, xenophobes, and misogynists, to the extent any of his more considered statements can be believed (which is highly doubtful), he is actually more "progressive" than Hillary in several arenas. He is supposedly against job- and industry-destroying "free trade" agreements. He is supposedly against using H-1B scabs to put American tech workers out of a job. He is supposedly against ruinous, counterproductive wars of choice. He is supposedly against provoking Russia into another Cold War and ultimately into World War III. (It was Bill Clinton who expanded NATO forces into former Warsaw Pact countries, and Hillary Clinton's State Department that helped the EU engineer the neo-Nazi coup in Ukraine.) He has said good things about single-payer healthcare (and then nonsensically claimed that it can't work here). In a rare instance of walking instead of talking, in the social-wedge arena, at least, he welcomed transsexuals to compete in the Miss Universe pageant. He doesn't have a political record, only a personal business record, and I don't believe the sincerity of anything he says, but it's no surprise that his message appeals to formerly middle-class blue-collar whites who have been screwed with their pants on by establishment Republicans and Democrats alike and who can't bring themselves to listen to a guy who persists in calling himself a "socialist."

Anyway, if you actually support Hillary for the reasons you claim -- because you imagine she will work effectively for progressive change -- you had better pray that Bernie gets the nomination, because a lot of Bernie and Trump supporters won't vote for Hillary under any circumstances.
13
I attended a Mothers of the Movement panel at Mt. Ararat Church here in Brooklyn today. Sybrina Fulton (mother of Trayvon Martin), Gwen Carr (mother of Eric Garner), Pam Bosley (mother of Terrell Bosley), Annette Holt (mother of Blair Holt), and Nardyne Jeffries (mother of Brishell Jeffries) were present. I have never attended a more wrenching event in my life. Each told the story of losing her child. They spoke about wanting to take to their beds and never wake up. They said that Hillary alone had reached out to check on them, listen to them, and encourage them to come together to spread their stories.

This event was a capsule of why Sanders struggles with African-American voters, especially older ones with families and children. He has not done the years of groundwork necessary to be able to ask for their trust. Surrounding himself with surrogates including the likes of Killer Mike (whose account of Seattle BLM protesters was debunked) and Cornel West (who described President Obama in unprintable words) has not impressed many. His words about Southern votes "not counting" are taken for the dogwhistle they are. The Mothers also had extremely harsh words for Bernie: about his performance in debate, his laughter while Hillary spoke about guns, and his desire to overturn the legacy of President Obama. The quote in the NYTimes article is apt: free college doesn't serve these women when they have no one left to send to college. Sanders is not a listener: he is an evangelist and ideologue who thrives on a captive audience. Why do these women trust Hillary? She listened.
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@13 (anyjenny):

There were around 13,300 deaths caused by firearms in the United States in 2015. Estimates of annual deaths caused by lack of health insurance range from 20,000 to 45,000. Obamacare reduced the number of nominally uninsured from around 49 million to 30 million, but increased the number of functionally uninsured by greatly expanding underinsurance (insurance where the out-of-pockets are so high that the nominal coverage is functionally unusable). It's not yet known what impact Obamacare has had on death rates, but Bernie's single-payer plan would eliminate underinsurance and lack of insurance entirely and, accordingly, eliminate deaths from lack of insurance. Hillary has only promised to look into tweaking the status quo and try to plug some of the gaps, when comprehensive, systemic reform is needed (as has been done in every other developed country). Let's remember, too, that the issue wasn't effective gun control, or cops killing black kids with guns, or black kids killing black kids with guns, or crazy people killing anyone with guns. It was about whether to hold manufacturers strictly liable for guns that, for whatever reason (theft, illegal retail sales, illegal interstate transportation, etc.), end up in the wrong hands. Bernie has a D- rating from the NRA because he is foreffective gun control. And if you think he doesn't listen to black voices and concerns as well as Hillary pretends to, I was at the Seattle rally where he yielded the mike for the entirety of the event to Black Lives Matter activists, and I've seen the video clip where Hillary tells them to get lost.

For a different perspective on whether Hillary (or Bill) genuinely feels the black community's pain, you'd do well to read this article:

Richard W. Behan, "Black Lives Don’t Matter, Black Votes Do: The Racial Hypocrisy of Hillary and Bill Clinton," CounterPunch, 15 April 2016

As for Obama -- anyone who doesn't support Obama must be a racist, right? -- his legacy with respect to bettering the lot of black people is nothing to brag about, any more than Clarence Thomas's is. During his administration, African-American household net worth has plummeted and poverty has risen, and Obama has done essentially nothing in response. He has been a devoted servant of Wall Street, mega-corporations, the for-profit health sector, the military-industrial complex, and the prison-industrial complex from the instant he started picking his first cabinet. I'm afraid I'm with Cornel West, Bruce Dixon, and Glen Ford -- and Michelle Alexander -- on this.

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